Attitudes toward and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people have changed significantly in the Western world over the last few decades, especially for white people and people of means, and this shift extends to geography as well. At the same time, a formal body of literature on geographies of sexualities and LGBTQI geographies has continued to grow with more positive support from the field as a whole [in 2013, this Annals book review is the first to examine works on geographies of sexualities]. A flurry of recent edited volumes, edited journal issues, and conferences on the subjects of space and sexuality has shifted the attention and respect given this body of work. This review considers two of these recent geography-focused works. Both take the work of geographies of sexualities in new, important, and timely directions.
Editors Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash assert in their introduction to Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research that there are no specific queer methods—instead the volume looks at how these methods and methodologies are designed and enacted. “Queer” is framed simultaneously as a political position, a theoretical approach, and a form of self-identification that refuses normative positions and power structures. The work of queering then refuses any stable or essential notions of sexual and gender identities, and it equally refutes any fixed conceptualizations of race, class, gender, position, context, desire, affect, or power.
A total of fifteen chapters written by eighteen contributors are organized into a “rhizomatic approach” (16). The varied projects, rural and urban, often Western and sometimes non-Western, and the range of qualitative and quantitative methods and methodologies employed in these chapters, highlight the different places and ways queer methods and methodologies can and are being deployed in geographic research. Some of the varying topics include work on an ethnography of lesbian and gay people of Indonesia and LGBTQI homophobic and heteronormative trends people in Second Life (Boellstorf); racializing and queering ethnographic field work with Los Angeles food cart vendors (Muñoz); queering communication between researcher and participants in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Australia (Gorman-Murray, Johnston, and Wiatt); emergences of researcher-participant desire in the field of the Atlantic Canadian coast (Jackman); interviews with transmen in Toronto by an “old-time lesbian” (Nash); an ethnography of the dis/connectivity of objects' materiality (Graham); and a national census survey of LGBTQI people in the United Kingdom (Browne). To queer even the reader's design, the editors reject categorization and support the overlap and complementary contributions of the authors. Instead there is a general flow from chapters that frame key concepts, to challenging traditional approaches in research design, and then on to rethinking the linkages among queer theories, methods, and methodologies. Although the attempt to queer the structure of a reader is noble, it meant many of the chapters were repetitive and lengthy in their descriptions of queer theory. This sacrificed room for more interesting analyses of methods and data. Nevertheless, each chapter's contributions were unique and enriching enough that I gladly read on. Other readers might find it more useful to use the introduction to choose chapters to read by method, discipline, or topic.
Reminiscent of the groundbreaking 1994 issue of The Professional Geographer on feminist methods, Queer Methods and Methodologies is one of the most significant contributions to geographies of sexualities in recent years thanks to its innovative, applied uses of queer theory in the practice, design, and analysis of research. Most exciting are the deep linkages between theory and method that each contributor provides. As Boellstorff writes, the “relationship between theory and data is a methodological problem” (210); that is, it is not only the choice and use of methods but also the methodologies that link ontological and epistemological positions to those methods. Similarly, the “perpetually unstable” (Nash, 141) position of the researcher is a common theme throughout in that work on queer methods and methodologies extends this instability to the researched, the research, and even the field itself. In an interesting theorization of the role of time in queer geographical methods, Rooke writes that ethnography can no longer split the past and present, the faraway field and the desk at home, as to do so is to split and privilege the researcher over and from the research and researched (30). Those interested in learning more about ways in which to apply queer theory and to advance the methods generally to their work will find the book helpful and inspiring.
In a more applied approach, Queer Spiritual Spaces: Sexuality and Sacred Places dives into the purportedly incongruous topics of non-heterosexualities and spiritualities by asking, “What are queer spiritual spaces and what happens in them?” (1). The editors chose their focus on spirituality given that although religion has faltered for many, especially in the West, spirituality persists. Given the paucity of work on this subject, the authors banded together as an interdisciplinary research group of geographers, sociologists, digital media scholars, and cultural studies scholars and collected new data from 150 LGBTQI people about their experience of spirituality and spiritual spaces. The editors also incorporated previously conducted research by younger scholars in the form of cowritten chapters with editors. Collaboratively written and researched in ten chapters by seven contributors, the research in Queer Spiritual Spaces covers different spiritualities in each chapter and splits the book between the experiences and spaces of traditional believers such as Muslims (Yip and Khalid), and nontraditionalists such as the Michigan Womyn's Folk Festival (Browne) or Findhorn community in Scotland (Browne and Dinnie). The editors frame the book through an introspective introduction on the role of the sublime (Munt), and geographical literature review on Western spirituality (Yip), and conclude with a thoughtful analysis of the collective patterns and stand-alone contributions of the authors (Browne). Dividing chapters by spirituality seemed oversimplified at times, as it isolated interesting arguments by spirituality; however this structure will be useful for those studying a specific religion or spirituality.
Using a queer theoretical approach similar to Queer Methods and Methodologies, the authors of Queer Spiritual Spaces give primary import to their participants' experiences of spiritual space. Such spaces include both preexisting in official structures, and fleeting, transcendent, and immanent moments of the sublime. The chapters on traditional spiritualities highlight the simultaneous welcoming and shunning of LGBTQI people in UK Quaker, Muslim, and Buddhist spaces and congregations. These juxtapositions push the readers to rethink assumptions of prejudice and the mechanisms of homophobic and heteronormative oppression at work in organized religion. Those chapters on the nontraditional spiritualities offered the most insights as to the production of these types of spaces for LGBTQI people. This work also speaks to the tenuous acts of resistance involved in these constructions, namely in the ways nontraditional spiritualities lap into other parts of everyday life and include sexuality as part of spiritual practice. For example, Riordan and White's work on LGBTQI online believers in the Second Life platform and in various chat groups shows how the virtual spiritualities and spaces can produce collectivity and senses of the infinite often limited by organized and material religiosity.
Queer Spiritual Spaces troubles the simple narratives of incompatibility between LGBTQI people and spiritual space, also highlighting the difficulty of locating an experience or belief that is often indescribable. Repeated discussions of the way inclusive and exclusive spaces, acts, and dogmas play out is a key theme throughout the book, and such analysis furthers the geographical literature related to studies of justice and injustice. I was left waiting to see if the authors and editors would explore the way resistance and resilience are manifest in these situations. I hope that future scholars can pick up this important question. I was also surprised that there is no mention or case study of the Metropolitan Church of Christ, a devotedly LGBTQI church based mainly in the United States. It is a positive demonstration of LGBTQI traditional spirituality. The book's greatest strength is its innovation and contribution to an understudied and conflictual aspect of intersectional identities and spaces. Its limitations stem from representing a relatively new body of literature.
These readers demonstrate how queer geographical approach is an essential part of the geographer's toolkit as it destabilizes norms associated with unequal social, cultural, political, and economic structures as well as uneven geographies. For scholars of sexualities and queer theorists, the informative role of space and place become apparent not only in analysis but in the actual practice of research as well. These readers fill many holes in the literature but point out that much remains to be written regarding geographies of sexualities, particularly beyond the Western sphere of U.S., UK, and Canadian experience. These include deeper analysis of the intersectionality of race and class identities, and greater attention given to bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and intersex people who remain at the margins of geographies of sexualities. For now, the possibility of queering and recognizing the stories of difference has been amplified with these methods. For this, the editors and authors have performed a useful, even crucial service.